Ever-Further Union What Happened to the European Idea?
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REVIEW ESSAY Ever-Further Union What Happened to the European Idea? By Andrew Moravcsik January/February 2020 IN THIS REVIEW he European Union may well be the most ambitious and successful experiment in voluntary T international cooperation in history. It has lasted longer than most national democracies in the world today. But it is deadly dull. So it is no surprise that novelists shun EU politics. How could a writer possibly find inspiration among the soulless steel and glass buildings of Brussels, where pedantic bureaucrats, politically correct diplomats, and remorseless lobbyists hammer out market regulations? Robert Menasse, a popular Austrian author and essayist, accepted the challenge. Ten years ago, he moved to Brussels with the quixotic aim of writing the first great EU novel. The resulting work, Die This site uses cookies to improve your user experience. Click here to learn more. CONTINUE Hauptstadt, was published in 2017 and won the most prestigious book prize in the German- speaking world, the German Book Prize. It now appears in English as The Capital. Menasse’s novel is a satirical send-up of contemporary Brussels. Alongside subplots involving terrorists, contract killers, police officers, farmers, fathers, sons, and a (perhaps imaginary) wild pig, the main narrative follows the rise and fall of two absurd plans to re-invigorate the EU: an official proposes that the European Commission’s 60th anniversary be celebrated at Auschwitz, and a retired Austrian economics professor—apparently the last true believer in federalism—seeks to renew European idealism by transferring the EU’s capital to the same spot. Of course, neither plan stands the slightest chance of success. They are easily shot down by venal lobbyists, conformist consultants, cynical national diplomats, and, in a deliciously Machiavellian scene, a suave official sitting atop the European Commission. Menasse gets many details of the EU just right. His cruel caricature of the technocratic, self- important, and sometimes petty bureaucratic culture of the commission is largely accurate. He skillfully renders the bland life of the expatriate in Brussels—not surprising, since his book research required him to become one. More profoundly, he captures how in modern Europe, where historical memories tied to a specific time and place have grown less vivid, people invoke the Holocaust and other epochal events without any real sense of their cultural and historical context. And Menasse has a way with metaphors—especially those involving pigs, which he invokes to symbolize a vast range of things, including pork-barrel politics, anti-Semitic rhetoric, and the wildness of human nature, from which modern bureaucrats are alienated. This site uses cookies to improve your user experience. Click here to learn more. CONTINUE A Brussels state of mind: in the European quarter in Brussels, October 2017 Sergi Reboredo / Alamy Stock Photo Menasse’s literary ambitions are far from modest. He explicitly models his book on one of the great modernist novels of the twentieth century: The Man Without Qualities, by his compatriot Robert Musil, who published three volumes of the novel between 1930 and 1943 but never completed it. Both works are political satires set during what Menasse called in a 2016 essay “the eve of an epochal rupture”—for Musil, it is World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and for Menasse,This sitit eis u saes possible cookies t ocollapse improve y oofur the use rEU. expe rBothience. peelClick backhere t oeveryday learn more. routines CONTIN UtoE reveal a world in which historical memory and religious belief are eroding and individual actions seem to lack any sense of higher purpose. And both weave rich tapestries out of seemingly disconnected actions through a panoramic collection of archetypes: the criminal outsider, the lonely lady, the political expert, the self-important political climber, the master manipulator. As if to dispel any doubt, The Capital coyly mentions that Musil’s novel is the favorite book of the fictional European Commission president—who, of course, has not actually read it. Yet Menasse is no Musil. He cannot match his predecessor’s edgy prose, and his comfortable and small-minded characters do not, as Musil’s do, peer over the edge of an abyss, questioning whether basic moral principles, or even life itself, have any deeper meaning. And the dangers facing Menasse’s Europe hardly compare with the existential threat World War I posed to Musil’s Austro- Hungarian Empire. If The Capital does not qualify as great literature, it is worth reading for another reason: to gain fresh insights into the way Europeans perceive the EU’s future. Many argue that the central challenge facing Europe today is the lack of a common political narrative with sufficient public resonance. Menasse explores a critical question that this concern raises: In an era in which historical memories, religious beliefs, and national identities are eroding, what ideals could revive public support for European integration? TOUGH CROWD This site uses cookies to improve your user experience. Click here to learn more. CONTINUE The EU does not lack for critics. They divide into two camps: those who believe Brussels should do less and those who believe it should do more. Both assert that the EU aims to replace nation-states, but the first group resists this goal, while the second applauds it. Resisters include the Euroskeptics behind Brexit and their right-wing populist and nationalist allies in France, Hungary, Italy, and Poland. These critics see themselves as defending the nation-state in the face of a tyrannous EU “superstate” bent on imposing socialism. The Capital, completed before Brexit and concerns of Russian meddling in European democracy, largely ignores these views. Instead, Menasse focuses on (and casts his lot with) the second group of critics—those who complain that the EU does not go far enough. Members of this group are generally left-wing in political orientation and view the EU as a dangerously neoliberal construction that fosters inequality, coddles corporations, and dampens progressive government policies. (That view may be reductive, but it is surely a more accurate critique of what the EU does than the one offered by the Euroskeptics.) These critics believe that Europe should move toward “ever-closer union” by enacting more generous pan-European fiscal and social policies, cushioning the harsh effects of globalization and liberalization, limiting environmental pollution and corporate prerogatives, defending human rights, and combating nationalism and right-wing populism. The EU, left-wing critics maintain, was an idealistic project from the start. This site uses cookies to improve your user experience. Click here to learn more. CONTINUE Left-wing critics of the EU receive less media attention than their right-wing counterparts, at least in the English-language press, but they are probably more numerous across Europe, and especially in Brussels. Menasse’s most sympathetic and thoughtful characters belong to this group. The EU, they maintain, was an idealistic project from the start, and its fortunes have risen and fallen with the idealism of its supporters. In the 1950s, those who launched European integration were largely political moderates, mostly Christian democrats, who viewed federalism as an instrument to vanquish the nationalism and political extremism that had caused two centuries of strife in Europe, culminating in World War II. The EU’s raison d’être, the idealists in Menasse’s book argue, was to prevent another war in Europe and another Auschwitz by stripping nation-states of their power and prerogatives in favor of a system of supranational governance. The Capital espouses a radical variant of this critique in the form of a rant delivered by the retired Austrian professor, Alois Erhart. Nation-states, he says, no longer stand for any common beliefs or practices, let alone for worthy ethical ideals. Farmers, multinational firms, and other venal special interests have captured policymaking. And when these narrow interests conflict, EU policy gridlocks, as exemplified by the perennial quibbles over the EU budget and by the failure of Germany to be more generous toward the eurozone debtor states, such as Greece. Even worse, Erhart charges, politicians peddle nationalism, which persuades citizens that their parochial claims are ethically justified and blinds them to their true identity as Europeans or as human beings. Even EU policy intellectuals lack a vision of the future. Instead, Erhart fumes, they are no better than the “pragmatists” who defended slavery in ancient Greece, low wages during the Industrial Revolution, or the followingTh isof s iHitler’ste uses co oorders.kies to improve your user experience. Click here to learn more. CONTINUE Near the European Council headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, October 2019 Toby Melville / Reuters For all these reasons, Erhart (and Menasse) concludes that nation-states will disintegrate of their own accord, as will the EU’s most powerful institutions, the European Council and the Council of Ministers, both of which represent member governments. The destruction of nation-states would also imply the collapse of national democracy as a mode of legitimation. The only remaining question is what to put in their place. Menasse argues that the EU must be transformed into a modern, postnationalThis site u swelfarees cookies state, to imp withrove y oitsur uownser e xsocial,perienc e.tax, Cli cfiscal,k here tando lea rhumann more. rightsCONTIN policies.UE Yet he does not, in The Capital or elsewhere, dwell much on policy details. His focus is on the radical new institutions and ideas required to legitimate such changes democratically—which would result in an “entirely new, globally innovative, bold European avant-garde” political system, as he described it in a 2012 essay. Breathless adjectives cannot disguise the fact that the details of Menasse’s postnational system remain frustratingly scarce.